Conference Call for Papers

The European Language Resource Association (ELRA) is glad to announce the 11th edition of LREC, organised with the support of international organisations – many from Asia: the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP), Oriental COCOSDA, the Association of Natural Language Processing – Japan, the Chinese Information Processing Society of China, the Linguistic Data Consortium, the Artificial Intelligence Association of Thailand, the Korean Society for Language and Information, the Korean Special Interest Group of Human and Cognitive Language Technology, …
CONFERENCE AIMS

LREC is the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies (HLT). LREC aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, communicate on-going and planned activities, identify industrial uses and needs, and address requirements from e-science and e-society, with respect to scientific, technology, policy and organisational issues.

For this edition, which celebrates its 20th anniversary, LREC goes East in order to support a stronger interaction and synergy with the Asian NLP community and to help promoting Asian Language Resources and Language Technologies.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from a wide spectrum of related disciplines to discuss issues and opportunities, find new synergies and promote initiatives for international cooperation, in support of investigations in language sciences, progress in language technologies (LT) and development of corresponding products, services and applications, and standards.
CONFERENCE TOPICS

Issues in the design, construction and use of LRs: text, speech, sign, gesture, image, in single or multimodal/multimedia data

Guidelines, standards, best practices and models for LRs interoperability
Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation
Methodologies and tools for extraction and acquisition of knowledge
Ontologies, terminology and knowledge representation
LRs and Semantic Web
LRs and Crowdsourcing
Metadata for LRs and semantic/content mark-up

International and national activities, projects and initiatives
Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs
Multilingual issues, language coverage and diversity, less-resourced languages
Open, linked and shared data and tools, open and collaborative architectures
Replicability and reproducibility issues
Organisational, economical, ethical and legal issues

LREC 2018 HOT TOPICS

Asian Language Resources

Special attention will be devoted to highlight the wide variety of initiatives for the creation, use and evaluation of Asian Language Resources and Technologies. Special attention will be paid to Less-Resourced Languages in the Asian area, including (local) Sign Languages.

International Contribution to Olympics 2020

LREC 2018 would like to promote all LTs that would support better interactions and communications between the Olympic 2020 visitors and the local hosts. This involves all speech- and text-based computer interactions, speech/sign to speech/sign translations, human-human communications mediated by computers, etc. Assessment of the above mentioned technologies is also an important area within LREC 2018.

Language Resources in the online World

In a time in which more and more (language) data are generated, either by human beings or by machines, and directly streamed, the question arises how LRs and LTs can cope with this development. A first challenge is to address and to provide for correctives to hate speeches, cyberbullying, fake news, etc. Can LT provide means to process and respond in a timely manner to such language data streamed in a huge amount at high speed? In this context, language technologists have to intensify cooperation with humanities, especially social and political sciences, psychology but also economics, and more.

DESCRIBE AND SHARE YOUR LRs!

In addition to describing your LRs in the LRE Map – now a normal step in the submission procedure of many conferences – LREC recognises the importance of sharing resources and making them available to the community.
When submitting a paper, you will be offered the possibility to share your LRs (data, tools, web-services, etc.), uploading them in a special LREC repository set up by ELRA. Your LRs will be made available to all LREC participants before the conference, to be re-used, compared, analysed. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, contributes to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.